When we say "navigate" it is actually nothing more that looking at the gps screen and making sure the little current position thingy, ie the bike, is actually following a line. The Routing line is kind of pink and solid, and is usually a straight line which approximately follows the road. The track line is a thinner dotted line which may well represent a more accurate position.
So, "Navigation", in either mode, is basically similar.
If BTFB just wanted to do a few days of touring I'd probably say oh, go with tracks; my concern is that there's insufficient capacity to do his big tour - what is it going to be - 2000 miles?
piedwagtail91 said:
most of the stuff down loadable from the internet is a track/tracklog.
Yes that's right, the mappping sites use track format as well.
piedwagtail91 said:
... you don't have to start putting waypoints in at turns and having a gps full of redundant waypoints afterwards.
OK, but you can plan a route without using "waypoints" as well, in fact I don't usually position ANY waypoints on my routes, I just plan the route as a series of mouse clicks joined by straight lines.
Bigtallfatbloke said:
I have th eGPS set to use a 'Bicycle' routing option. However it is still selecting some very busy roads like the A127 ...
Yes, that's why I think planning your own route is more or less essential. If you're going to accept the gps' planned routes, you don't need to do any route planning - just use Auto-Routing, Follow Road, that's it. Don't even need a pc.
Bigtallfatbloke said:
What would really help me here would be if someone could kindly go into Bike route toaster and plot a ride using the maximum number of track points/waypoints possible , so that if that route were stored into the GPS 20 times it would have enough memory to accept all of those routes (rides). Then post a screen shot of the Map page and the summary page for that 50km ride(1000km/20 tracks @500points max?)
I did this on Friday I think. I duplicated a 241-point route 50 times, ie the same route with 50 different names, and uploaded the whole lot to my unit. I still had some waypoint memory left. There *may* be a saving by having 50 sets of 241 identical route points, I just don't know, obviously planning 50 different 250-point routes is a massive task ... unless someone can automate a slight variation in the co-ordinates of each .gpx file
Bigtallfatbloke said:
... the maximum track, route and waypoints are that i can use in a single 'ride' so that the routes can be loade dinto the GPS without me getting continuos memory insufficiant error messages.
I'm not convinced that Insufficient Error messages are down to straight overloading of waypoints as such. Are you getting this message when you do a Route Calculation? If so I *think* it might be an internal overload error. When you try to upload a route with too many waypoints, you get a pop-up says "Route Truncated" and the route just stops at 250 points in.
Regarding the number of points, MapSource has an in-built facility to reduce the number of waypoints. I downloaded routes (oh, tracks, actually) from GPStracks, joined them up into a massive circular route, divided it into 100 km sections, then down-sampled each section to 250 points or less. Converted to route, upload to gps. That's it. No messing about with waypoints.
So you needn't be too concerned if you end up with a route with too many points - this can be dealt with.